One sure way to start an argument when tasting with others is to decry the effects of the yeast organism brettanomyces in a wine. Someone is bound to roll eyes and proclaim the opposite. I know. It's happened to me. A lot.

But if it takes an academically trained pro to detect brettanomyces, should it matter for ordinary wine drinkers? I say it does, and here's why.

I love science. I grew up reading Isaac Asimov essays, and I lap up the latest scientific papers about wine. I came across the following nuggets in recent weeks, ranging from intriguing to frankly frivolous. Each one of them got me thinking. Maybe they will for you too.

After nearly a decade of mediocre red wines, many flawed by the spoilage yeast brettanomyces, the owners of this once prominent Napa Valley winery have released the first vintage of what seem to be clean, complex Cabernets.

Just back from two weeks in Europe, with stops in Paris, Lyon, Piemonte and Liguria. Intentionally, I scoped out relatively modest restaurants rather than anything trendy or luxe. (More about those in a future blog.) Thus, for the most part, my encounters with food and wine were blissfully free of attitude or pretension.

I promised my wife that I would not allow work to impinge on vacation. There was, however, one notable exception, when the volatile issue of "natural wines" reared its head and I had to deal with an awkward situation. I am an agnostic on natural wines, neither insisting upon drinking them nor avoiding them. For me the issue is always how good the wine is to drink, and all the better if it offers something beyond a pleasant way to wash down dinner.

Most winemakers do their best to ensure that their wines are stable when they're bottled. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose if they knowingly bottle a wine that still has active microbes that could lead to something along the lines of brettanomyces.

That doesn't mean that problems can't crop up once a wine is bottle. They often do. The subject came up in my blog earlier this week when I tasted a 20-wine vertical of Peter Michael's Cabernet-based Les Pavots bottlings. A reader asked whether it's possible that fermentable sugar might be the cause of brett in some of the Les Pavots bottlings, but I don't think it's likely.

Several pieces of conventional wisdom dashed while tasting Australian Shiraz and California Syrah: Aussie Shiraz is not necessarily the monster in the room. Brettanomyces does not kill a wine for everyone, even for excellent tasters. And even a steak likes a more balanced wine.

After reading through some of the notes on a particular Rhône producer’s wines recently, a reader asked me if I had any problem with brettanomyces (commonly called brett), a spoilage yeast that can crop up on either grapes or in barrels. The reader picked up on some descriptors in tasting notes that they thought were red flags for brett, yet the wines scored highly and had long cellaring recommendations. They asked, "How could it be?"

As the tastings wind down for any given varietal, and the wines that need a second, or third, or even fourth review pass through the tasting room, sometimes things get ugly. We re-taste wines for a variety of reasons.

Some wine writers, mostly the ones that rail against the 100-point scale, would have their readers believe that tasters like me and my Wine Spectator colleagues wouldn't recognize a great, delicate wine or one that wasn't a fruit bomb if it jumped out of the glass at us.

"Is it a flaw or is it the wine?" This is a question that I often think about. This is mostly because I am frequently accused of being too charitable toward wines that display any of a wide range of things that some winemakers and drinkers deem unacceptable.